Measuring our impact
people severely affected by mental illness.
Our vision as a charity is to ensure that everyone severely affected by mental illness is able to live their best lives. By this we mean individuals living with mental illness, their carers and their friends and families having a good quality of life which is on a par with everyone else.
Rethink Mental Illness has a wide remit; we have services, groups, helplines, and we work in a variety of settings, such as hospitals, care homes, prisons and in the community. We're dedicated to providing practical support, accessible online advice and information resources, and comprehensive training. Feedback regularly informs the way we work, but we wanted to create a way to understand more deeply our effectiveness: what works well, and what works less well.
We wanted to see the impact of our work; to see if our targets to create the best possible quality of life for people living with severe mental illness were on track, and see how we can continue to make improvements. In order to do this, we have created an Impact Framework. This strategic approach helps guide us in what information to collect across everything we do as an organisation. It gives us a clearer picture of our impact and how we are making a difference for people severely affected by mental illness.
Whether our work as a charitable organisation makes a difference is a hugely valid and difficult question to answer. In this podcast, Deputy CEO Brian Dow chats with our Head of Evidence and Impact, Richard McManus, to help understand how we measure our work.
| Listen to our podcast |
The Impact Framework is owned by everyone within the organisation. We all play a part in achieving our mission, whether that be through direct service delivery, influencing and campaigning, shaping local provision or ensuring we remain a strong and sustainable organisation.
We will use the Impact Framework to hold ourselves to account, ensuring that we continually reflect and improve in order to achieve the greatest possible long-term impact for the people we support.
When it comes to supporting people severely affected by mental illness, making sure people are able to access high quality treatment in a timely manner is one vital part of the picture. But we also need to think about all the other factors that shape our mental health: our housing, our jobs, our financial situation, and our support networks. We think it’s time that communities and organisations come together to play their part in providing social activities, volunteering opportunities, or advice for issues such as debt or employment. This in turn can lighten the burden that people with mental illness carry.
So, in short, our communities that care strategy looks at supporting the 'whole person', and helps them to thrive, not just survive. Our impact framework is part of this wider strategy.
Understanding our impact: where we are making a positive difference and where we are not, gives us lots of ways we can improve the way we operate, and ultimately further improve the impact we have on people's lives.
It means we can look at if there are particular groups, like people with certain protected characteristics, who are seeing less positive outcomes. It gives us tangible evidence and ideas on what we can do to change the way we support people.
It means we can identify and try out new ways of working, new programmes and services intended to address the needs of people with severe mental illness which emerge through our impact evaluation work.
It also gives us a lot of information on the needs of people severely affected by mental illness. This information underpins our policy and campaigns work, meaning we are able to draw on the experiences of the thousands of people we directly support.
If there was the right treatment at the right time, this would lead to a much improved quality of life for people living with mental illness.
Our vision for a better future
Before we could measure our impact, we needed to first work out what a good quality of life looked like to people with lived experience of severe mental illness and carers. We worked with thousands of people with severe mental illness, carers, professionals, and through research and engagement, agreed upon the following key areas:
People living with mental illness and their carers, get the right treatment, care and support at the right time in the right place.
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People living with mental illness have the opportunity to take on meaningful employment, education, training and volunteering.
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People living with mental illness enjoy good physical health. Living with mental illness should not affect life expectancy.
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Social connectednessPeople living with mental illness, and carers, can sustain and develop the social connections that mean the most to them.
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Financial stabilityPeople do not end up in debt because of their mental illness or become more unwell because of money problems.
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What we have found so far
We have started using our Impact Framework to measure the difference we make across our organisation. Some of the findings are shown below:
Impact in numbers
- 84%Improved quality of life84% of people across all of our services said the support they received improved their quality of life
- 94%Feeling involved in their care94% of people supported by our prisons services felt involved in their care planning
- 85%Feel less isolated85% of carers we support felt less socially isolated and more connected
- 96%Improved mental health & wellbeing96% of our community service users show improved mental health and wellbeing
- 82%Achieving their goals82% of our supported accommodation service users are making progress to their goals
- 92%Would recommend us92% of all of our service users would recommend the service
"I don't feel scared now I'm not alone. I also feel safe having staff to reach out to if I need to, and I feel if things get too much I have someone to reach out to instead of harming myself."
“Having support has made a massive difference. without the support from Martin I wouldn't be here now. I still have a long way to go but I am now getting help from mental health services and have been having EMDR treatment.”
We continue to embed coproduction in our impact measurement: we are incredibly lucky to work with peer researchers - people with lived experience of mental illness who are involved at all stages of our evaluation and research. We also have an Evidence and Impact Lived Experience Group - a group of amazing people with a varied range of lived experiences of severe mental illness and caring. Our group meets monthly and acts a sounding board and critique for the main projects we are working on, ensuring our important work is coproduced and relevant.
Research tools included in the Impact Framework include:
- Recovering Quality of Life (University of Sheffield)
- DIALOG+ (Queen Mary University of London; East London NHS Foundation Trust)
- Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (University of Warwick; University of Edinburgh)
- Goals Based Outcomes (Dr Duncan Law; UCL)
- Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (CORE 10; Core Systems Trust)
- The National Development Team for Inclusion Advocacy Outcomes Survey (NDTI)
- Life Skills Profile (University of South Wales)
- Camberwell Assessment of Need Short Appraisal Schedule (Royal College of Psychiatrists)
We use a Microsoft Business Intelligence software called Power BI. We use it to create live dashboards for all of the data we produce. It contains all the responses given by the people who use our services when they complete surveys, or their demographic information and much more. As soon as new information is stored, our services can see this in real time.
Staff can look at their own service, or other services and find out things like the average age of the people in the service, the gender or ethnicity of service users, how long people have been in the service, and many other important things. People using the service may also want to write feedback about a service, and we can publicly display comments or quotes when people give us permission to do so.
The constantly up-to-date information that we are receiving, helps us to see what is happening in our services, and means we are able to track exactly how we are doing now, but also helps us plan for the future. This live data also is used to to inform the other things we do as an organisation: our policy and campaigns work for example, ensuring that everything we do is based on up to date comprehensive evidence about people affected by severe mental illness.
You can download the Impact Framework at the bottom of this page to look at the details.
- I have a place I can call home
- I have social connections that are meaningful to me
- I have opportunities in my life to develop the way I want
- I have enough money to meet my needs
- I am able to look after my physical health
- I have access to the right support when I need it
- I am able to manage my mental health
- I have fulfilling personal relationships
- I feel safe
- I feel valued
- I enjoy how I spend my time
- I feel accepted
But we know we are not there yet. We need to do much more to measure our impact and use this information to learn and improve. We need to keep checking that how we are working is benefiting people. We need to keep investing in new approaches and involving people with experience at every level. We also need to work closely with others to make sure we are campaigning influencing the government, improving services, and truly transforming community mental health.
We won't stop until all people affected by severe mental illness have the best quality of life possible. We will continue to use our Impact Framework to guide what we do and how we best use our resources to achieve our mission.
We are also really keen to get feedback on the questions we are asking as we want to ensure we are continually improving our ways of capturing and using the responses that we get. If you would like to send us feedback, please email research@rethink.org
please click on the button below.
Benefits can be a lifeline but can be complicated, so the financial needs of people living with mental illness must also be addressed.
our Impact Framework
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